Minutes before the Vermont House voted 99 – 39 in support of H.289, the bill that changes the Renewable Energy Standard to require more wind and solar to be built in Vermont, Rep. Marc Mihaly of Calais told the body,
“The SEA Group which did a lot of the modeling relied upon here calculated the financial benefits to Vermonters and they’re nearly double the costs.”
Rep. Mihaly’s statement was especially influential because he was lauded as an “expert” by House Appropriations Chair Diane Lanpher during that committee’s discussion of the costs associated with the bill.
I was taken aback by Rep. Mihaly’s claim, because I was a member of the Department of Public Service’s Renewable Energy Standard Stakeholder Advisory Group which heard directly from SEA Group when they presented the report* on their modeling.
At no time did SEA Group calculate that the financial benefits to Vermonters are nearly double the costs.
What SEA Group determined was that
· All scenarios modeled increase financial costs to Vermonters. GHG benefits are excluded because Vermont does not have polluting power plants to reduce emissions. Price suppression benefits are regional and Vermont gets only 4% of those benefits.
· Benefits were almost entirely societal and regional, not specific to Vermont.
· The only cost benefit shown by SEA Group was potential price suppression regionally. Vermont was credited with 4%.
As a member of the DPS RES SAG, my takeaway from the report on the modeling was that emissions reduction benefits were overestimated and environmental costs were underestimated. No land use impacts specific to Vermont were included in the model’s environmental costs.
Impact to ratepayers is the jurisdiction of House Environment & Energy, which got competing memos from Renewable Energy Vermont and DPS on Feb. 6, the day the bill was voted out of committee. Those memos about costs to ratepayers were never discussed in committee prior to the vote.
Two money committees, House Ways & Means and House Appropriations, took testimony on the costs and benefits to the state from Joint Fiscal Office’s Joyce Manchester, who wrote three different versions of the Fiscal Note on which legislators rely.
At no time did either committee hear directly from Department of Public Service Energy Planner TJ Poor. He waited in the committee room in House Ways & Means, prepared to testify. He was never asked by Chair Emily Kornheiser to provide information. JFO’s Joyce Manchester provided her first Fiscal Note to House Ways & Means, then revised it a week later and presented it to the committee before they voted the bill out.
JFO’s third Fiscal Note was presented to House Appropriations. In response to questioning, JFO’s Joyce Manchester said she prepared the updated note in consultation with Regulatory Assistance Project. RAP’s principle Richard Cowart is partners with Rep. Mihaly in a group net metering system in Calais where they both live. In committee, Rep. Mihaly was seen winking at the renewable energy lobbyists prior to presenting his glowing support of the legislation.
Totally missing from the discussion in all three House committees, except for this author’s invited testimony, are the land use impacts from doubling the Tier 2 in-state renewable requirement. The effect, according to SEA Group, REV and DPS, is a nearly 3-fold increase in lands necessary to build all those required new renewables. Business as Usual (BAU) is about 800 acres while REV and DPS testified in House Environment and Energy that the proposed RES would increase that to 2200 to 2400 acres.
In recent years, the Fish & Wildlife Commissioner testified that their program for reviews of Act 250 and Section 248 applications is underfunded. JFO did not include an increase in state staffing necessary to review the increased land use impacts that this RES will require. The money committees in the House charged with reviewing impacts to state government never heard about the needs of the Fish & Wildlife Department. Testimony this year in House Environment & Energy on the Act 250 bill by the person who does those reviews now was that he is overwhelmed with work.
Fiscal responsibility, or the lack of it by House leadership and members, is causing tremendous financial harm to Vermonters. This is not the time to be hastily putting in place a bill that will benefit in-state developers in the short term and out-of-state investment banks to whom almost all of Vermont’s renewable energy projects are sold in the long term.
This commentary is offered with all due respect to our legislators who believe they are doing good but in this case, they are failing the people of Vermont who can least afford to pay more for electricity. If legislators want to see more people pushed over the tipping point and into the streets and woods by higher monthly bills, they could find no better vehicle for increasing the unhoused population than by passing this RES update.
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Help Us Put an End to Politicians and Developers Using Our Public Waters as Their Private Cesspool
Public Hearing, this Thursday,
on the “Legal Dumping” of Human Waste
into Otter Creek and Lake Champlain–our recreational waters and drinking water supply
The Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources will hold a public meeting on Thursday, September 2, 2021, on the proposed permits for four wastewater treatment facilities: Wallingford, Pittsford, Brandon and Rutland. Rutland, in particular, is notorious for diverting untreated human feces and urine, industrial toxins, and gutter pollutants into public waters, having done so, that we know of, more than 500 times in the last 6 years alone. This must stop. We cannot continue to add more demands on failing and inadequate treatment plants–the operators are maxed out, stormwater and wastewater are insufficient, and drinking water treatment is outdated. We are literally slowly poisoning our home and ourselves.
Please make your voice heard! These permits only come up for hearings every five years and Rutland has been operating on a permit from 2002!!! Yes, 19 years with no public review! Please do not let these permits to pollute go unchallenged! We must fight back demanding that no new permits be issued until developers and municipalities can demonstrate sufficient environmental protections are in place.
The public hearing will begin at 6pm in the Asa Bloomer State Building, located at 88 Merchants Row and 92 State Street Rutland, VT 05702, Conference Room 266. A virtual option for attending the meeting will also be available.
Written public comments on the proposed permits must be received on or before the close of the business day (4:30 pm) on September 10, 2021, to the Agency of Natural Resources, Department of Environmental Conservation, Watershed Management Division, 1 National Life Drive, David Bldg 3rd Floor, Montpelier, Vermont 05620-3522. Comments may also be submitted by e-mail using the e-mail comment provisions included at http://dec.vermont.gov/watershed/wastewater/ public-notices–fact-sheets–draft-permits. All comments received by the above date will be considered in formulation of the final determinations.
In making a final determination on the applications, the Agency will consider all information received by that date or presented at the meeting.
Please make your voice heard. Nothing will change until more of us speak out. We need not be experts to file a comment or make a statement expressing our expectation that politicians and supposed state environmental protection officials prioritize protecting our health and wellbeing and that of our natural world. If we don’t they will continue to work on behalf of developers only focused on their own profits spreading false messages that rain is the cause of pollution.
As always, please let me know how I can be of service to you in advancing our mutual interest in swimmable, drinkable, and fishable waters.
Video of Don McDowell, retired Stowe High School science teacher, at public hearing held by Vermont Agency of Natural Resources about Casella’s Coventry Landfill and its impacts on Lake Memphremagog, August 24, 2021
How the Public Utility Commission Sacrifices Vermont’s Scenic Beauty
Our recent journey into a previously overlooked area of Vermont’s regulatory decision-making process began with a phone call from a neighbor of the field in the photo to the right, the site of a proposed 500 kW net-metered solar array in Manchester with a view of Mt. Equinox.
The caller explained that the evidentiary hearing was held the day before, but he and his neighbors had no clue how to participate in the Public Utility Commission’s (PUC) process. As a result, they had nothing in the evidentiary record to support their issues with the site, which include the fact that the field floods regularly, resulting in ice jams in winter. And then there is the view – the scenic natural beauty of the area, which is enjoyed by residents of the neighborhood and drivers on Richville Road.
We learned from reading the transcript of the hearing that the PUC Hearing Officer asked the parties to Brief two specific topics:
1) the part of the Quechee analysis (aesthetics test) about whether a project offends the sensibilities of the average person, and
2) “societal benefits.”
While we were aware that the PUC added a section to the Quechee analysis that was developed for use in Act 250 to evaluate aesthetic effects of a development, it is not something we paid much attention to. We will from now on. Here’s why:
I am motivated to write from the trenches of Vermont, where some of the film’s footage is centered, in response to the strident accusations that “Planet of the Humans” is causing tremendous damage to the climate change movement by casting renewables – wind, solar and biomass – in negative terms full of inaccuracies.
“Planet of the Humans” was too kind to renewable energy. It is an ugly business. Greed and political power combine with renewable energy to destroy the environment and the lives of the people who live nearby.
After the video’s release, I received a critique originating from Vermont by someone I do not know stating, “My guess is that the group he is walking with in this section is Annette Smith’s Vermonters for a Clean Environment, which has done more harm to Vermont’s transition off of fossil fuels to renewable energy than everyone else combined.” Yes, that’s me, the thorn in the side of renewable developers. No, I was not in the film.
In 2009, an industrial wind project was proposed in my county. Numerous people on both sides reached out asking us to get involved.
To my surprise, wind energy development, especially on top of mountains, raised numerous issues. I had seen the eleven 196’ tall 600 kW wind turbines built in 1996 in southern Vermont and thought they were beautiful. I went with a friend whose farm hosted SolarFest to see a New York project with fifty 420’ tall 2.5 mW wind turbines. We talked to a farmer who hosted some of the turbines. We talked to neighbors who wished they hadn’t signed the lease because the noise was horrible after being told there would be no noise. On the ride home we agreed that what we saw was “very disturbing.”
The next ten years blur together as Vermonters elected a governor committed to building as much renewable energy everywhere possible.
When the Lowell Mountains were being sacrificed for the wind project developed by Green Mountain Power — subsidiary of Energir, 30% owned by fossil fuel pipeline developer Enbridge — Vermonters hiked up the other side of the mountain to see for themselves what “green energy” looks like.
A Vermonter invited Bill McKibben to come see for himself. He declined.
After the wind project was built, the Nelsons got sick from the wind project’s acoustic emissions and had no choice but to sell to GMP. It came with a gag order so Don and Shirley cannot talk about their experience. They were collateral damage. Many other neighbors of industrial wind projects have shared the same fate.
As more wind projects were proposed in Vermont, I watched people lose their innocence as they, like me, thought wind and solar energy were going to save the planet. The more we learned, the more opposed we became.
The film neglects the societal damage caused by wind energy. Wind developers’ playbook requires dividing communities. It is guaranteed that opposition will arise, so they try to create a proponent group to combat the opponents. Even areas where wind projects have failed are left with animosities that will take generations to heal. We have seen companies offer to write letters for proponents to send to the local papers and try to buy votes.
We have grieved the loss of people who have died deaths of despair after the mountains they loved were destroyed or their homes became uninhabitable after the wind projects become operational.
In 2016, I felt the wrath of the wind and solar industry when someone filed a complaint with Vermont’s Attorney General alleging I was practicing law without a license by assisting people in participating in the regulatory process for energy projects at the Public Utility Commission. It was a criminal investigation. Newspapereditorials and Green Mountain Power came to my defense. I hired a criminal defense attorney who wrote a letter to the AG pointing out that “the AG’s office is not the surrogate of the politically frustrated.” The AG dropped it, and an attorney who previously sent a letter telling me he represented a wind and solar developer admitted he filed the complaint, but claimed he did it on his own.
Industrial solar is no better. A wealthy developer seeking to cut more than 100 acres of forest filed lawsuits against a town, neighbors, state agencies, and even the governor while proclaiming he is saving the planet and anyone who stands in his way is “signing the death warrant of many Americans.”
This year, biomass plant owner Engie came to the Vermont legislature seeking subsidies to enable continuing burning forests for a small amount of electricity that drives up rates for Vermonters. The state’s leading environmental group Vermont Natural Resources Council, with Bill McKibben on their Advisory Committee, supported it. Bill McKibben did not weigh in. Apparently he prefers to maximize his own carbon footprint by traveling the planet lecturing people about how they have to reduce their carbon footprint.
Try to talk to Bill McKibben about solar and wind energy. He treats it as a personal attack as though his feeling are hurt. He can endlessly rattle off statistics about climate change. But, when asked the question about who funds 350.org, he acted stupid, or as though it wasn’t relevant.
I looked up 350.org’s 990s and learned that in 2017 the organization had $19 million in funding. Over a five year period, the organization’s funding was $66 million. It is reasonable to expect Bill McKibben to know its source.
Please do not feel sorry for Bill McKibben. He and his enablers doth protest too much.
Yes, “Planet of the Humans” was too kind to the renewablists. It is all about the money. “Climate emergency” activists and their funders are doing a lot of damage to the planet by focusing only on CO2, proclaiming wind and solar will save the planet, distracting us from the overarching issues of pollution, population and over-consumption that are killing our planet.
Tuesday, January 7, 2020 1:00 PM Act 250 Introductions, Narrative Review Ellen Czajkowski, Legislative Counsel, Office of Legislative Council Peter Walke, Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources Brian Shupe, Executive Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council Chris Cochran, Director of Community Planning & Revitalization, Housing and Community Development
Tuesday, January 14, 2020 1:00 PM Act 250 Administration Proposals Matthew Chapman, General Counsel, Agency of Natural Resources Jon Groveman, Policy and Water Program Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council Chris Cochran, Director of Community Planning & Revitalization, Housing and Community Development Peter Walke, Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources Billy Coster, Director of Planning and Policy, Agency of Natural Resources Greg Boulbol, General Counsel, Natural Resources Board 3:00 PM Act 250 Annette Smith, Executive Director, Vermonters for a Clean Environment
Tuesday, January 14, 2020 3:45 PM Act 250 Slate Quarries, Mapping Diane Snelling, Chair, Natural Resources Board Ryan Knox, GIS Professional, Agency of Natural Resources Chris Smid, New England Slate Company Craig Markcrow, Owner and President, Vermont Structural Slate Company Jon Hill, Owner, Green Stone SlateContinue reading →
The state is investigating the Chittenden Solid Waste District for allegedly dumping glass it collects from northern Vermont instead of recycling the material as required.
The state put the district on notice last year that it had allegedly violated environmental laws. The allegations resurfaced Wednesday in a Senate committee; Chittenden Solid Waste District officials say they have not done anything wrong.
John Brabant was a state regulator on waste issues for 25 years and now works for Vermonters for a Clean Environment, an activist group.Continue reading →
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